Thankfully, sources close to the situation said he was actually
asked to leave the company, including pressure from investors.
It’s definitely a bridge too far — the entire group of founders
has already wallowed into a number of controversial issues,
calling attention mostly to their idiotic hijinks than to their
business.

Moghadam apologized for the comments, telling Valleywag, "I
got carried away with making the annotations and making any
comment about his sister was in horrible taste, thankfully the
rap genius community edits out my poor judgement, I am very sorry
for writing it."

The current version of the annotated document is far from great,
but the hope is that the annotations will improve over time as
the story unfolds and it will eventually be a good resource for
people looking to understand this tragedy.

Almost all the annotations were at least attempting a close
reading – they were genuinely, though imperfectly, trying to add
context to the text and make it easier to understand.

However, Mahbod Moghadam, one of my co-founders, annotated the
piece with annotations that not only didn’t attempt to enhance
anyone’s understanding of the text, but went beyond that into
gleeful insensitivity and misogyny. All of which is contrary to
everything we’re trying to accomplish at Rap Genius.

Were Mahbod’s annotations posted by a new Rap Genius user, it
would be up to our community leaders, who set the tone of the
site and our approach to annotation, to delete them and explain
to the new user why they were unacceptable.

Were Mahbod’s annotations posted by a Rap Genius moderator, that
person would cease to be an effective community leader and would
have to step down.

And Mahbod, our original community leader, is no exception. In
light of this, Mahbod has resigned – both in his capacity as an
employee of the company, and as a member of our board of
directors, effective immediately.

Mahbod is my friend. He's a brilliant, creative, complicated
person with a ton of love in his heart. Without Mahbod Rap Genius
would not exist, and I am grateful for all he has done to help
Rap Genius succeed. But I cannot let him compromise the Rap
Genius mission – a mission that remains almost as delicate and
inchoate as it was when we three founders decided to devote our
lives to it almost 5 years ago.